Red Wings @ Lightning - 2/17

Brad Stuart will return to the Detroit Red Wings lineup on Thursday as the team visits the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Stuart has missed 15 games since suffering a broken jaw on a hit from Tom Kostopolous in Detroit's 5-4 win over the Calgary Flames on January 7.

The Wings are coming off of a sweep of the Boston Bruins in their home-and-home series last weekend. Thursday's matchup in Tampa is the first game of a two-day road trip through Florida, with a visit to the Panthers on the schedule for Friday night.

The Lightning are coming off a shootout loss to the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday.

Ruslan Salei has been given an extra personal day (he was home in California all week to be with his wife and newborn child). This means Jakub Kindl stays in the lineup tonight. Salei will be back tomorrow.

As I tweeted earlier, rode down the escalator at Tampa International right in front of Trevor Thompson. High point of the day so far. The game can't get here soon enough.

Edit: Salei's wife hasn't given birth yet. Misread the article. She's just very pregnant and he's been spending time with her. Still good on the Wings for letting their players do that. Same thing happened with Brad Stuart in 2008.

Overheard someone in the concourse at St. Pete Times Forum say that the game was closer than the score showed. That's BS, though, aside from a five-minute stretch in the second period, the Red Wings dominated.

There was a guy behind me who kept yelling "Come on, Vinny!" to Vincent Lecavalier. A sign of how lopsided the game was is Lecavalier. He led the Lightning with six shots but got absolutely nothing and finished the night a -2.

The Wings did a fantastic job of limiting Tampa's chances, even if they allowed 40 shots against. There weren't a lot of times the Lightning really threatened (again, ignoring the five minutes in the second period).

Jimmy Howard came through with a strong performance on the chances that the team in front of him did allow. He made some big stops in the first period and looks more confident than he did during the Wings' mini-slump a couple weeks ago.

In all, it was a shutdown effort against a team that wanted to use Detroit as a measuring stick. Can't ask for much more than that.